Click the Button to go to the On-line Store

Rainforest Station will again be vending at the Swartz Creek Retpile Expo 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, April 4, at the Swartz Creek Masonic Temple, 7839 Miller Road, Swartz Creek MI 48473.

Jeweled Curly Tail Lizards

We will be bringing some neat field-collected lizards including Asian Water Dragons, Vietnam Tree Dragons, Red-Headed Agamas, Pink-Bellied Swifts, Desert Side-Blotched Lizards, and Jeweled Curly Tailed Lizards.

We don’t normally carry field-collected animals, but these are all great animals for breeding projects, and we’re hoping people will begin to breed more of these species that are difficult to find captive-bred.

We’ll also have CB juvenile Red-Eyed Tree Frogs, Dendrobates leucomelas, D. tinctorius “Infer-Alanis,” blue-phase Australian White’s tree frogs, and a couple other surprises.

We also just received a new shipment of Irish peat bricks.  These are solid peat, straight from the bogs of Ireland, not those compressed briquettes that fall apart when soaked in water.  These make great “dams” or embankments along the edge of water features.  Moss and climbing plants will root right into them, and they create a very natural looking transition.

Also watch for an announcement on the On-Line Store homepage about new, lower pricing on Exo-Terra terrariums!

Remember, we offer free delivery to the show for on-line purchases, just choose “store pickup” in the shipping options, and leave a note in the comment section that you want us to bring your purchase to the show.

The following weekend, April 11 and 12 Rainforest Station will be vending at the Michigan Reptile Show on Saturday, and the West Michigan Reptile Show in Grand Rapids on Sunday.  We offer free delivery to those shows as well.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via email or by phone (number is in the blog and store banners).

We’re working to bring the image of the on-line store in line with the retail store.  Click on the button above, and see what you think!

Click the Button to go to the On-line Store

These Gorgeous Cobalt Blue Tincs won’t last long!

I apologize to everyone who is living through my steep learning curve with me, but in the meantime, the following link will take you right to my email address:

Jim’s email

WHEW!!! After an entire weekend of combing through the PHP script and updating all the links (heck, I didn’t even know what a relational link was until I had to fix this problem!) I think I’ve solved our security certificate problem with the on-line store. 

But, if you’ve already bookmarked the storefront, you’ll have to change the URL to stop getting the error.  Just click on the On-Line Store button at the top of this post, and it will give take the correct route to the store to avoid the error, and then re-bookmark it.

We are gearing up for fall with a couple new offerings that we will be talking more about in the next couple weeks, so keep an eye on the news page.  We’ve also added the Lansing Reptile and Exotic Animal Show to our schedule, Saturday, May 24, so if you’re in the area, please stop by to say “Hi.”

Happy Frogging,

Jim and Marcia 

Well, we’ve learned more about PHP scripting than we ever wanted to know, but we finally got the on-line store up and running.

The site is on an SSL server, but it is a shared SSL certificate belonging to our ISP, so you may get a certificate error when you sign on.  Don’t worry, it’s secure.  We are working with our ISP to get our own SSL certificate in the near future.

We decided not to wait until we had all of our products on the site before going live, so keep an eye out as we add to our catalog of high-quality amphibian merchandise.

 We also have a few “tweaks” needed to completely customize the store, and will work on those as we progress.  If you notice any problems with the site, please let us know on our contact page.  Even if you don’t notice problems, please feel free to let us know how you like it.

We look forward to using this new tool to more efficiently serve our customers, and look forward to hearing from you,.

Happy frogging,

Jim and Marcia

New for the West Michigan Reptile Expo April 13 in Grand Rapids, and the Kalamazoo Reptile Show April 19, we have beautiful captive-bred poison dart frogs!

Stunningly colored, and beautifully patterned, these juvenile frogs are the perfect inhabitants in your naturalistic terrarium.  And, like all captive bred dart frogs (and long term captive wild-caught specimens) they are not even toxic.

We will have striking Dendrobates auratus Panamanian Green & Bronze morphs.  These guys start out looking like standard Green & Black frogs, but as they reach maturity, the black fades to a metallic bronze brown.  The green on these little guys ranges from bright lime to a metallic color I last saw on a 2008 Ford Mustang!

Then there are one of my all-time personal favorites, Cryptophyllobates azureiventris, the Sky Blue Poison Dart Frog.  The belly and legs on these diminuitive little guys is a beautiful sky blue with black reticulations.  The juveniles have orange/yellow dorso-lateral stripes that, if they follow their parents’ coloration, will change to bright lemon yellow as they mature.

From one tiny geographic location in the Andes mountains of Peru, C. azureiventris is the only species in its genus (although it, along with the entire dart frog family is the process of being reclassified), and is one of the rarest dart frogs in the pet hobby.

Last, but certainly not least, is the Big Kahuna of the dart frog hobby, Dendrobates azureus (O.K., so the new nomenclature argues it should be D. tinctorius, but more on that later*).

D. azureus has been a perennial favorite in the hobby, even though it wasn’t officially described until 1981. A number of factors have led to its popularity, certainly not the least of which is the absolutely striking coloration of this frog.  Our juvenile azureus frogs are F-1 generation and an absolutely stunning royal blue with black reticulations.

Another factor leading to their popularity is the outgoing nature of azureus.  Some dart frogs tend toward the shy end of the spectrum, but azureus isn’t one of them.  As soon as I walk in the frog room, these guys start hopping over to the front of the tank looking for food.

And, man can they eat!  These frogs will also get fairly large by dart frog standards, and can put away a lot of fruit flies.

Luckily, we are also ramping up our fruit fly production, and will have plenty of D. melanogaster and D. Hydei cultures available.  We’ll even have culturing kits with our own fruit fly media that makes culturing your own flies inexpensive.

*O.K., I promised to explain the whole azureus/tinctorius thing.  In a nutshell, D. azureus lives in the wild in only one small patch of Suriname rainforest that is surrounded by dry, impassible (at least for a frog) savannah. Surrounding this savannah is more rain forest that is the home to the incredibly variable Dendrobates tinctorius species and its myriad color morphs.  While azureus had originally been classified as a separate species, recent research seems to indicate that it really is just a separate color morph of tinctorius, which was separated from the rest of the species around the time of the last ice age. This separation provided for the development of a very distict coloration, but not enough time for the actual genetic changes of speciation.  Make sense?

Wait until I get into the rest of the new dart frog scientific nomenclature debate.

And I was just getting to the point where I could recognize (and pronounce) the old names!

See you at the show, and if you have any questions, be sure to contact us.

p.s., we are also getting very close to launching our on-line store, which will accept payment via credit cards through paypal!  Whooooo HOoooo!

Real JUNGLE VINES!
REAL as in, “somebody cut these things down with a machete, and shipped them to us!”

Frankenstein Vines

Perhaps the craziest looking of the bunch are Frankenstein Vines. These knarly, twisty things look like some sort of mistake of evolution – they are so ugly they are cool!

Then, there are the Surreal Vines:

Surreal VinesNatives call these undulating beauties “Monkey Ladders” because of their shape. One of these would look really cool with a vining plant like creeping fig working its way up the ladder.

Dangling Pig Tail Vines look like the monkeys got bored and started braiding the vines just for kicks:

Dangling Pig Tail Vines

These are available in two sizes: the smallest are about an inch in diameter, the larger up to 3 inches in diameter.

If you’ve got a critter that’s more on the chunky side, you might want to consider a Sumba Vine:

Sumba Vines

These fat boys are thick and strong, easily able to handle a full size dragon, monitor, or a pretty big snake!

Looking for more “freak factor”? How about a Tentacled Shoot?

Tentacled Shoot

What the heck? did a hurricane drop an octopus in the jungle, where it dried up into these?

Or, are you looking for something different that the same old driftwood to create climbing perches? Bali Wood Blossoms are just the trick!

Bali Wood Bloosom

Sometimes referred to as “parasite wood,” these freaks of nature grow out of fruit trees on the island of Bali. Residents cut them off, and the lumps left on the tree trunk aid in climbing the tree to harvest the fruit.

These can be used anywhere you would use driftwood to make a perch: mount them sticking out of the substrate, silicone them to the background, whatever, they will catch viewers’ eyes much more than another chunk of driftwood.

Questions? Feel free to contact us

Dart frogs like to use bromeliads as both a place to perch, and to rear their tadpoles. Bromeliads hold a small pool of water at the cup created at the base of the leaves, and many species of dart frogs will deposit their tads in these to keep them safe from predators. If you are getting into darts, you’ve got to have some of these in your vivarium. Get them now, so they have a chance to get established before you get your darts – which are due later this spring!
We are also carrying epiphytic orchids, mounted on cork bark.

We are looking forward to seeing these orchids bloom, because they arrived from the wholesaler without I.D. tags. We were told they are all terrarium compatible, so look at it as a surprise package!

And, we have added to our selection of tropical plants with several new varieties of philodendron, fern, and two varieties of alocasia.

We also received a new shipment of sheet moss, and still have some nice pillow moss in stock.

The Pillow Moss can be used to cover the entire substrate, or as an accent with sheet moss or leaf litter.
And, speaking of leaf litter, we are now stocking Magnolia Leaves, the premium leaf to use if you want to create a layer of leaf litter. Magnolia leaves are slow to decay, so they don’t throw off the nutrient balance of the vivarium like some other leaves can. They provide great hiding places for both microfauna and feeder insects, forcing your frogs to behave more like they would in the wild, foraging for food, instead of just waiting for it to drop to the substrate in front of them.

And, watch for another post on our new natural Jungle Vines. Imported directly from the rain forest, we now have all kinds of sizes and shapes of REAL jungle vines for your vivarium. These are really COOL, and I can’t wait for you to see them!

If you can’t make the Grand Rapids show, look us up at the Kalamazoo Reptile Show on February 23.

Have a question? Feel free to Contact Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K7-I-gx-3E